Pluto : Big Sky AstroBlog

Mar

4

I spent several happy, contemplative hours last week painting one wall in our bedroom a pale, icy pink. This required us to drag our new 900 lb. sleigh bed away from the wall, a feat not unlike the raising of Stonehenge or those giant heads on Easter Island. Then, in the process of shoving the bed back into place a couple of days ago, we… broke it. We shoved a little too enthusiastically at the foot board, I guess, and finally it shoved back, exploding in a kind of splintery rage and kicking my right shin, leaving it bruised and raw.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that’s any way for a bed to behave. Beds should be comforting, Cancerian. Being attacked by one’s bed is as jarring as being smacked by one’s mother.

Sigh. Mars in Cancer, man: she’s back, she’s nearing an opposition to Pluto (exact Friday morning), and she’s not messing around!

It’s gonna be a hectic week astrologically - Venus conjoins Neptune on Thursday, Mars opposes Pluto just before Friday’s New Moon, and the Sun makes its annual rendevous with exciting (but disruptive) Uranus on Saturday. Other than my furniture attacking me, though, I can’t complain. Still, the week is young. How’s everyone else coping?

March 4, 2008 | 4 Comments

Jan

2

2008 Glancing at my spanking new 2008 Pocket Astrologer I was startled to note today’s Mars/Pluto opposition (1:28 pm PST), since I can usually feel those puppies coming from a mile away. Yet this one had flown right below my radar, obscured by clouds of mellowness and mindless television. (El spouse had 11 days off work and, other than a brief junket to L.A. for a couple of days, we spent them relaxing, reading, visiting with friends, and sleeping late. Completely fabulous.) Looking back at a blog entry from late September, I see a woman frazzled and overworked as the last Mars/Pluto opposition knocked me down, kicked me hard, and stole my lunch money. It’s amazing what a mini-vacation can do for a gal; today’s opposition finds me relaxed and cheery, with an utterly free day ahead of me. Not to brag, or anything.

I was on a near-total media blackout for the past week and a half, but a few big stories managed to squeeze through. The Bhutto assassination was shocking, which is weird considering it was entirely expected. I gather the U.S. presidential hopefuls have been practically wetting themselves in their efforts to woo the fine people of Iowa. A tiger got loose in the San Francisco Zoo, killed someone, and injured a couple of other people. Robin Wright Penn gave sourpuss Sean Penn his walking papers, and presumably Lindsey Lohan got up to something or other. But here in the Kent household, all was happiness.

A holiday expedition to a bookstore garnered a couple of fine reads - How I Got Published, a collection of essays by writers about their experiences getting their stuff into print (which should more aptly be titled, “How I Got My Mystery Novel Published,” since the overwhelming majority of contributors seem to be from that genre… not that there’s anything wrong with that). Not a lot of surprises here - “persist” seems to be the thrust of the thing - but it was an enjoyable read nevertheless.

I also picked up something called You, Inc. (coincidentally, also the title of my latest essay for the Llewellyn Moon Sign book, out this summer in the 2009 edition) which is a surprisingly readable, inspirational without being goopy, Jupiter-in-Capricorn appropriate guide to pimping yourself effectively and mercilessly. A perfect primer for yours truly, because despite my Leonine swagger and bravado I’m trembling in my boots at going forth into the cruel world and promoting my tiny cupcake of a book. Ack!

Well, anyway. Happy new year and all. Pluto goes into Capricorn soon and of course there’s that Saturn/Uranus opposition this year, so I’m enjoying the peace and quiet while we have them. Buckle up.

January 2, 2008 | 12 Comments

Nov

27

I was standing in a dusty, enchanting used bookstore in Julian, California yesterday afternoon when the universe nearly hit me over the head with a subtle message regarding my future.

I was making a pilgrimage to meet with Steven Forrest, master of myth and mischief, in the remote and forbidding desert town of Borrego Springs. My mind was itchy with thoughts about my so-called career; which direction to take next, what kinds of worthy projects might occupy my time and thoughts. After having a quick lunch and procuring a couple of famous Julian pies as a treat for Steve, Jonny and I strolled across the road to investigate the local bookstore. It was a sleepy Monday afternoon and we had the place all to ourselves - four or five rooms of an old bungalow, filled with well-organized shelves. Moments after I entered the room marked “Metaphysics”, I heard a book-like thud from the next room. I peeked around the corner; no one was in the room. On a whim, I bent over to retrieve the fallen volume.

It wasn’t the rather lurid picture of a gun on the cover that caught my eye. Rather, it was the title: Solar Eclipse. As many Big Sky Astrology readers know, eclipses are one of my real astrological passions. In fact, I pitched the idea for a book about eclipses to my publisher before we ever talked about a wedding book - but they had Celeste Teal’s fine book in the queue, so we had moved on to other ideas. But a book about eclipses is one I’ve always felt most passionately that I’d like to write.

So I looked at the book, and I thought about why I was on the road to see The Great Man, and all the questions I’d been turning over in the my mind, all the things I wanted to ask him about, most of which boiled down to a single question: Should I write another book? And I thought about something I once learned, which is that moving in the direction of the North Node always gets you something that’s absolutely right for you, even if it’s not in precisely the form you’d expected.

Yesterday, Pluto was trine my natal North Node in the 9th house within one minute of orb, with Jupiter close behind. Fittingly, Pluto had picked me up and was carrying me toward one of my teachers, a suitably 9th house figure. The meeting was fabulous and magical, and the reading began (naturally) with my North Node. I came away with all the insights I didn’t even know I was looking for, and confirmation that the path ahead is one with heart.

But along the way, wise Pluto waylaid me in a tiny, remote mountain town and nearly dropped a book (9th house!) on my head - just to make sure the message was unmistakable, and to let me feel like the discovery was all mine.

November 27, 2007 | 9 Comments

Nov

7

I’m in the throes of editing the author proofs for my book, and it’s painful. Over the years, I’ve perfected a rather obsessive writing process - dashing off a draft, printing it out, marking it up; typing in the changes, printing it out, marking it up; lather, rinse, and repeat as needed, often five or six times for a simple essay. One weeps for the trees, but I can’t seem to edit on the computer - I’ve got to see it on the page, cross things out, and shoehorn in barely-legible transitional phrases. It’s messy, but it works for me; with a 1,000 word essay, I can usually get the prose so tight you could bounce a quarter off it.

This is the process I used, more or less, when writing the book. But it simply wasn’t feasible to massage all fourteen sections of the book to the extent I would a single essay. So now, as I roam the pages I find mess after hot mess. I don’t blame my scrupulous editor or careful proofreader, because these are not the sorts of messes they would have been expected to catch or clean up. They’re messes of rhythm and word choice, meter and imagery. So I’m itching to scrawl all over every clean, cute page with my brand-new purple marker; but I restrain myself, because someone else has to be able to read my notes and I can’t just scrawl them in my usual haphazard fashion. And even after I’ve written in my neatly printed comments, I can’t be sure I’ve fixed something to my satisfaction because I can’t type in the new stuff and print it out in exactly the same format. I should have broken down in the beginning and taken the thing down to Kinkos and had a “mess” copy made for myself, then transferred everything over to the proofs in a sane, legible fashion.

Ack! I’m in mildly OCD, Saturn in Virgo hell. I can only work through a couple of chapters a day because I’m so tense as I read through it, waiting to find something intrinsically stupid and not-easily-fixable. It seems to fit the symbolism of transiting Saturn conjoining my natal Pluto, though I couldn’t explain exactly why.

# # #

In other Saturn/Pluto news, I’ve been working with a hypnotherapist for a few weeks. He’s a fabulous fellow - he’s one of those November 1 birthday Scorpios I seem to magnetize, with his Sun, appropriately enough, conjoining my natal Neptune (and his, since he was born just a few months after me). Needless to say we click, and the hypnosis has been startlingly effective in altering some long-troublesome thought and behavior patterns. But it seems to work a bit like chiropractic, in that you make an adjustment and initially everything feels great, but then the shock of realignment freaks out the rest of the system and before you know it, you’re right back where you started. I’ll stay with it, though; it certainly seems like exactly the right work to do under the influence of Saturn/Pluto.

# # #

Finally, I don’t know what cosmic noise to attribute this to, but doesn’t it seem like there’s a hell of a lot of horrendous torture imagery in the news and in film right now? Or am I feeling especially sensitive to it because of my own Saturn/Pluto situation? I’m sitting there last night watching, I don’t know, the Chappelle Show or something, and suddenly I’m presented with this nightmarish commercial for a movie about anesthesia… the gist seemed to be that the patients in the film aren’t actually asleep, just paralyzed during a surgical procedure? I can barely write about it, it freaked me out so profoundly. How, exactly, is this entertainment? Meanwhile, congress appears to be a stone’s throw away from officially endorsing torture by confirming Bush’s latest AG nominee/horror. What is it in our collective unconscious that’s rearing up and inflicting this violent cruelty and ugliness on the world? It’s not just Mars turning retrograde in the progressed US chart, because it ain’t just happening here.

Are any of you getting hit with a Saturn/Pluto
transit? What’s happening with you?

November 7, 2007 | 12 Comments

keep looking »

Sign of Scorpio

Moon goes void of course at
8:46 am on Sep.5, 2008

Moon enters Sagittarius at
12:12 am on Sep.6, 2008